People spend an increasing amount of time consuming various types of recorded or computer-generated content during their leisure time, for example video from both professional production studios and amateur sources through traditional broadcast or cable sources, or over computer networks; various types of video games or similar interactive content, content posted on online social media sites, or just content from the World Wide Web generally. A significant fraction of this content or the systems used to deliver it are funded by advertising. Such advertising includes traditional broadcast ads, streaming video or audio ads, web page banner or pop-up ads, product placement within content, interactive icons or regions in streaming video, and other forms. Often, advertising interferes with the user experience in various ways, such that it is viewed as a negative.
The content of the advertisements may be used or referenced in portions of video content. It therefore would be desirable for the content of the advertisements to be presented during the corresponding portion of the video content. For example, advertisements may be presented on an auxiliary device or different area of the screen so as to not intrude on the user experience. However, it is undesirable for the advertisement to be separated from the corresponding portion of video content as this may detract from positive user interest in the advertisement. Furthermore, an amount of time and effort for a single entity to match advertisements to a topically relevant portion of the video content may not be economically feasible, in many circumstances. As used herein, “advertisement” includes either paid or unpaid commercial messages, and non-commercial messages, in either case of a sort that are broadcast or multicast to multiple users based on some targeting criteria. Targeting criteria may include, for example, criteria from demographic profiles or users' interest profiles inferred from available consumption data.
Another aspect of content consumption and advertising is the tendency for content to be consumed by a user in many different venues and using many different delivery platforms. For example, a user may view content on a television; or using a mobile phone, a notepad device, a laptop or desktop computer; or may view content in a cinema or on an electronic billboard. Some delivery platforms by be devices owned or controlled by the person viewing the content, while other platforms may be under the control of other people. The diversification and fragmentation of content delivery channels makes it correspondingly hard to integrate delivery of advertising or other information across multiple platforms or channels.
It would be desirable, therefore, to develop new hardware, network systems, user interfaces, and other new technologies for applications of signal processing to match the advertisements to video content (e.g., short video clips) and/or to corresponding proper portions of video content by requesting assistance from entities other than the video producer. It would be further desirable to develop new hardware, network systems, user interfaces, and other new technologies for applications of signal processing and the operation of visual user interfaces to provide information of interest and a user interface in an interactive user interface device that organizes and shares the information based on user input, that overcomes the limitations of the prior art, and enhances the ease, convenience and utility of electronic communication.